Many thanks for all those who supported this event. I hope you enjoyed your runs across this varied part of the New Forest.

I originally undertook to hold this event back in Easter, and after a couple of visits in the spring, I had pretty much planned most of the courses.
They all started in the open heathland before diving into the wooded enclosures and the longer course reached some of the open parts south of the Acres Down car park, I
liked the contrast between the open running and the wooded, but runnable (at that time) enclosures.

After a very warm and wet may, the ever increasing amount of bracken made those original plans (and also to use some of the more technical gravel extraction areas) unworkable. I replanned the courses and tried to maintain the transfers between open and copsed areas, but was prevented from using longer route choice legs across some of the valleys due to the density of the undergrowth. Unfortunately I had already submitted the limits of usage to the FC, else I would have extended the courses Westward over more of the heathland.

In the end I was reasonably happy with the courses, but had perhaps compromised the courses a little in my efforts to keep you out of the thicker bracken and to keep the total number of controls down.

This was my first stab at planning or organising an event (I hope it didnt show), and for the most part was thoroughly enjoyable (what a great excuse to get out to a lovely part of the forest, and select some of the nicest parts of the forest to run through); and Ive learnt a lot about the total amount of work that goes into any event. It was a shame I didnt get to wander out and see some of you running across the open parts (or cursing at some of the slight dampness! )

The weather held out on us, and with no other event anywhere nearby, we managed to attract some travellers from outside the region - I hope they thought it was worthwhile.

Many thanks to Charlie for a crash course in OCAD, to Jerry for an updated Emit DB, to Di and Terry for FC liason and control collection, to Ray for control placing and to Lisa for unsolicited help in collecting controls.

Next SOC Event, also in the New Forest on 7th September at the very picturesque and runnable area of Redshoot.

After receiving a combined House and Buildings Insurance quote that was 100 quid dearer than last years, I can only presume that in the light if Direct Line’s recent financial difficulties they
are hoping all their policyholders are a procastinational (is that even a word?) bunch.

Yep....I got to that stage where Id progressed beyond the tutorials and starting mixing data from different weblogs...works fine for the main index.php, but for some reason related to caching, mixing
your weblogs within other templates doesnt work unless you specify dynamic="off” within your weblog:entries tag.

I also tried storing an email address in a weblog and using that for the contact field at the top of the page. I think EE is a bit to clever for its own good here, as it automatically encodes email
addresses so that Spammers cant scrape them off your HTML and I believe its a combination of this and its auto creation of links from HTTP and URL tags that messes things up. I expect like the issue
above there is a way round it (I just havent found it yet). I just resorted back to using the global {webmaster_mail} tag.

Ive got to say, Im rather impressed with the ease with which everything got installed and getting to the stage where an initial page was being served. Ive been running through
the video tutorials and abundance of documentation and have got to grips with the some of the basic concepts involved (weblogs, templates, template groups, custom fields).

The data in the about field (and also some hidden date, Date Of Birth etc) is held in one personal ‘weblog’, also containing the name of the ‘weblog’ which contains the main posting/blogging data. When the main index.php page is rendered, the correct personal data is extracted and displayed.

I had one issue with my Hosting server that doesnt pass the correct URL suffix parts to EE (http:\\stmassey.f2s.com\index.php\search\index). A quick admin config change then inserts the ‘?’ character and the correct data is passed to EE as a parameter instead.

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A sideways glance at certain portions of Sam Massey's life. Expect to see more than a couple of sporting entries, but you might be waiting a while for work-related entries (unless you all really want to know how to lower your lock contention in high throughput WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus scenarios....no...I didnt think so). There should be plenty of GPS tracks from runs and walks, a few tasting notes from my occasional encounters with Hostelries serving proper beer and a realistic (read pessimistic) view of Saints football.